If your country has "democratic" in the name it's probably not democratic. If your major has "science" in the name it's probably not science. If your company has "don't be evil" in its motto...
Any man who must say, "I am the king" is no true king.
Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
181–190 of 510 posts
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#182If your country has "democratic" in the name it's probably not democratic. If your major has "science" in the name it's probably not science. If your company has "don't be evil" in its motto...
So Computer Science is Engineering?
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#183The intended conclusion isn't explcitly stated, so: private sharing enables this danger; public sharing prevents it, aka publishing.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#184I'm amazed at how relaxed their response is. If I told someone about some of my work and then found out they'd tried to patent it, I would be pissed !
If you want your secrets to remain secret, you shouldn’t divulge your secrets.
If you want to protect your secrets, you should patent them so when someone figures out your secret, or in this case your creative idea, you have a leg to stand on. Otherwise, they figure out your secret or idea and you have nothing. This is the entire purpose of patents and, despite many of the current issues with patents, they are still effective in many cases.
While you can argue patents are only paper, a valuable patent is worth defending. In this case, she was able to demonstrate prior art, meaning that a patent could not be granted since they have no idea to protect since it's been in the public domain (i.e. released to the world) and not an original/non-trivial idea. This is why academic publication, or in the past the use of laboratory journals, are useful in documenting time of the invention.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#185Regina Dugan is a former head of DARPA as well as ATAP. She has an impressive resume. Why would she do something like this? For a not particularly important patent, LED popup books? It seems bizarre. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_E._Dugan
The same Wikipedia article that mentions a Wired article of potential conflict of interest when working for the US goverment and awarding a contract for a company she owned stock in. Totally sounds like a non-corrupt human.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#186It’s down to individuals rather than culture in these things. By purely statistics, an organisation of any size has less than ethical people in it even if they have the best outward impression. Unfortunately these sorts of people tend to favour power and slowly work their way to positions that give them that. Then the whole org is a bad apple. Having been in a similar situation before, the correct answer is “I’ll get…
Repeated unethical behavior is not the fault of a few bad actors, but of an organization designed to encourage that behavior. I wouldn't discount Google as being at fault seeing as how we already have two instances of Google's ATAP committing patent fraud despite little research and outreach being done. One fun fact I stumbled across is any misconduct when filing for a patent voids the entire patent application, not…
It can also result in attorney discipline.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#187I'm amazed at how relaxed their response is. If I told someone about some of my work and then found out they'd tried to patent it, I would be pissed !
If you want your secrets to remain secret, you shouldn’t divulge your secrets.
There is a big difference between open research that you don't want Google to lock away behind a patent and 'secrets'. Her ideas weren't secret, she just didn't want Google to own the patent to it.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#188She worded that way too diplomatically. What google did here is one of the evilest things you can do. They are taking open research and trying to close it off. Research that they didn't even contribute to! Research that they didn't need patent rights for because it's already free for them to use. But they can't allow anyone after them to have the same privilege can they?
Maybe. Or maybe the conversation spurred some new idea in the same general field, and that’s what they were trying to patent. This post doesn’t say anything about what the claims were actually directed to.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#189Its another example of why these types of patents shouldn't even be allowed. There are always a large number of people who don't get credit and/or won't get paid. And then all of the people who have very similar ideas or maybe the same one who get blocked from bringing products to market. If the patent system somehow made it so people like the author of this post would actually make lots of money, that would be diffe…
Sounds like you signed something assigning your rights to the company.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#190Did you sign Google's visitor agreement? Did you read Google's visitor agreement. You give up some IP rights by signing that. This is a case where it matters. When I visited Google, I refused to sign. They just give you a badge that said you didn't sign.
Unless you've been visiting other offices from the one I've been visiting, the agreement pretty much says:
* No taking photographs or video without permission.
* Don't disclose things you see in the office outside the office
It's literally 3 sentences, and they have handy little icons next to each.
I see nothing about IP rights assignment or anything of the sort.